Mridul K. Thomas

I’m teaching a free online workshop on Bayesian optimal experimental design on Nov 18th, with @raviranjan.bsky.social . We environmental scientists waste a huge amount of effort on experiments that don't tell us much. Ravi & I want to fix that. Please sign up and share! forms.gle/oatKwoFJCBkc...

Fredrik found that we didn't have a mathematical description of how salinity affects growth rate. We came up with two and show they accurately capture the salinity response of hundreds of phytoplankton strains - and other taxa as well. We can now model how salinity shapes population dynamics! 🌊

Fredrik compiled so much data on salinity-dependent growth that he was able to make some rich comparisons in salinity traits between environments and taxa, and also examine trait correlations.

Fredrik found that we didn't have a mathematical description of how salinity affects growth rate. We came up with two and show they accurately capture the salinity response of hundreds of phytoplankton strains - and other taxa as well. We can now model how salinity shapes population dynamics! 🌊

A cartogram is a map distorted to be proportional to some property, such as population density. Why don't we use them in oceanography? I've never seen one even for primary productivity, which is concentrated around coasts.

I'm more pro-LLM than most but am baffled by established experts clearly using LLMs to write for them. Even when it's not slop, it's so strangely structured. You can see the cheap persuasion tricks because they are everywhere now. What bothers me more is how human writing will change in response.

I expect people will start to write in a raw, crude, ungrammatical style to avoid the antiseptic ChatGPT/Claude affect. The next generation of LLMs would ape this. Where does our writing go after that?

Question for ecologists: Why aren't we seeing big advances in theoretical ecology, given that LLMs are revolutionising maths? Is theory already at the (relevant) maths frontier? Do existing problems lend themselves more to numerical solutions? Are advances mostly happening on narrower topics?

Odd wildfire fact: 2026 has seen the least European territory burned of any year in the last 15. Caveat: this runs till a week ago and so misses the big ones of the past few days. And I don't know the source dataset myself, I am relying on OWID. ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumu...

I've been baffled by this figure. Why is Europe low when the big European countries show more - sometimes record - levels of fire this year? It turns out this pattern is entirely driven by Russia, which I didn't realise was counted as Europe in these datasets. ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumu...

I think there's plenty of scope to improve how we do science and enjoy debating this. But this is one of the more puzzling essays I have read. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

They have a point - plenty of work is uninformative and a waste of effort. But I would have liked to see them grapple with the trade-offs here. We want surprise as well as rigour, and we want it to be tractable, fast, and cheap. Eventually all the low-hanging fruit gets picked!

I think there's plenty of scope to improve how we do science and enjoy debating this. But this is one of the more puzzling essays I have read. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The authors do seem to belatedly recognise this. Their solution is "independent methods, diverse datasets, distant researchers, and intersecting theoretical mechanisms". But all of this isn't possible in one surprising study!

I think there's plenty of scope to improve how we do science and enjoy debating this. But this is one of the more puzzling essays I have read. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is immediately followed by the opposing claim that scientists who shift the community's opinion the most reap the largest rewards. These claims together imply a bimodal reward structure: either be boring or revolutionary, not in-between. Perhaps - but this isn't spelt out, let alone defended.

I think there's plenty of scope to improve how we do science and enjoy debating this. But this is one of the more puzzling essays I have read. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Since we're in a heat wave: Despite apparently popular belief, running an electric fan helps even when it is hotter than 35C / 95 F. Humidity matters but 35C is a bad rule of thumb. Take it from someone who has spent a LOT of time above 35C.

Here's the UK NHS, which says that fans become harmful at 35C / 95 F. Not as bad as the US but still bad advice, especially given that the UK is more uniformly humid than the US, and the threshold will be higher in humid conditions. www.nhs.uk/live-well/se...

Since we're in a heat wave: Despite apparently popular belief, running an electric fan helps even when it is hotter than 35C / 95 F. Humidity matters but 35C is a bad rule of thumb. Take it from someone who has spent a LOT of time above 35C.

Actually, don't take it from me. Here's an experimental study that says it works till roughly 43-45 C at low relative humidity (25%). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... That limit is likely lower for extremely low humidity and higher for normal-to-high humidity levels.